As for PR, if it doens't show, this does not mean that it is not there.

Me too, would you be my personal spokesperson now that I have a month to try hopelessly to trade links on pages that are probably PR4-6 but now show zero (it's just annoying that they show BL's w/o PR) PageRank and still rank well in SERPs.

"...to gaslight someone is to drive them crazy by intentionally confusing them. It comes from the 1944 movie Gaslight, in which sweet heiress Ingrid Bergman marries creepy Charles Boyer, who hopes to get her inheritance by driving her insane. He convinces her she's seeing and hearing things that don't exist, including the gaslights (what they had before light bulbs) going on and off when he isn't home.

"Gaslighting" is still in use, but it's not very common. It's most famous appearance in recent years is probably in the song "Gaslighting Abbie" (2000) by Steely Dan, which describes gaslighting as a "a luscious invention for three, one summer by the sea." Their explanation of how to gaslight someone is as follows:

...we'll do a fright night With blood and everything Some punky laughter from the kitchen And then - a nice relaxing hand of solitaire"

I've personally long contended that the engineering staff must sit behind their consoles eating sandwiches for lunch that they bring from home, watching us and having weekly meetings about what their next trick should be to confound us. Something like having an in-house baseball pool, if you will. Something like a company sport. ;)

Is the PR update continuing or over? The home page of my site's back links grow from 20+ to 79, its PR goes from 4 to 5. But one of my product page's back link grow from 0 to 71, all with PR 4 and 4+. But its' PR is still 0. I heard of sandbox, which influences new site, now new pages right. That product page is new, less than 1 month.

As usual, when Google takes longer to do something than normal, something is screwed up. In this case no new backlinks or PR for new pages put up after late April. I expect we'll see another PR and backlink update relatively soon, in a couple weeks. And, I'd suggest that the toolbar PR we are seeing is temporarily further from "real" PR than usual. All those new pages and new sites are mostly factored in already, even though they just show whitebars. The fact they have some (often incomplete) backlinks suggests that.

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Totally agree with Steveb. Nearly all the new pages of mine added in late April and after have no PR in this round. I said "nearly" because I saw 1 new page got PR1 with 88 internal backlinks whereas it should actually be PR4 like the other pages in the same site. Very strange...Although there is nothing to do with the traffic and serp, it could be a bad sign that signals Google's lack of proficiency to deliver the right and update information to the users (In this case, they are "we" who are webmasters & seo).

could the PR toolbar be related to the sandbox effect? no PR = no credits for backlinks(even thought they show as backlinks)

is everybody's sites with PR0's sandboxed or out of it?

for my sites it certainly shows that PR0 sites are sandboxed.. and a couple old established sites that are not sandboxed are still showing the same PR as b4 the update and ranking well... i.e no PR loss..

Thought I should update you and get your opinions. Previously I stated in this thread that I could not see any PR/search results/backlinks etc. updates but today everything changed. PR is altering across several sites, hundreds of pages have been added and rankings have slighly gone up.

But why the long delay from the original post in this thread on 31st of May to the changes happening to my site today - 3rd June? And I must stress that the PR changes and ranking changes only occured today as I had checked last night at 11.30pm and they were the same as ever. I noticed that several of you have stated that the PR change happened first and then the shift in results.

Any ideas on how the Google update schedule runs because I am now completely lost! This seems like Google has gone - 'Yay! Yay! IPO! IPO! .... oooops, is anyone running the search engine? Damn! Quick, run all the updates!'

I don't think I can offer any experiences or opinions that may be of any kind of help for you, Mike. What I have seen has been undramatic. SERPs have had the small tweaks every day or every other day that I have seen for weeks in the search terms that I monitor.

I have not really checked PR or backlinks since I saw the first changes two days ago, but the little I have seen seems to indicate that PR and backlinks for new pages have been fluktuating in separate rhythms in those two days without influencing SERPs.

One page has in those two days been showing each of these combinations:

No PR and no backlinks. PR and backlinks. PR but no backlinks. Backlinks but no PR.

This is so ho-hum I'm not even sure it deserves the dignity of us giving it attention by calling it an upate. ;)

I couldn’t agree more…

IMHO Google is doing nothing more than gaslighting us to try to force SEOs into going out and getting "real jobs."

...

Personally I think SEO's will be around loooong after Google's gone the way of its predecessors. SEO is evolving. I learnt after the whole Florida outrage - and people have been saying it in these forums forever - build big content rich sites that are logically SEO'd, acquire honest back links and before you know it (or after about 6 months to a year) you'll have a successful busy site and any traffic you get from Google will be nothing more than a bonus. People like us do not need Google to survive, and I for one will never get a real job ;-)

Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to inform you that you're probably nowhere near as important as many of you believe.

I really don't think Google troubles itself that much with a SEOs. I mean, as long as the results they provide are seen to be better than competitors in order to keep users loyal, that's all that matters.

I seriously doubt they are on a crusade to rid the results of SEO'd sites. They're more likely trying to work out how to pull big important sites up the rankings, because their webmasters / designers pay little or no attention to what the search engine can read or figure out!

I am tempted to call this "un-update" because while regularly serps used to change a little everyday with small reshuffles, this time, for the last few days, I have found my serps to be frozen completely. I am changing links - removing and adding, changing anchor texts and keywords every day, and all sort of things reasonable people like us are supposed to do, and nothing is happening to the serps. Nothing, nada, zip.

Actually, I was just kidding. However, I have made my crosslinking to almost 0, keyword densities extremely low, no keywords in the anchor texts, and it has not affected the rankings at all. Wondering about time-delayed effects now.

Some more very important technology related pages have vanished from SERPs in the past couple of days so they must be "improving things" again. That search result spam which has taken their place is reallly useful.

Search for widget technology and the number four result is full of porn, travel, and mortgage offers.

Number six result is a .edu site which is cloaked to appear to google to be a text page stuffed full of keywords while there is nothing useful actually on the page.

Lots of people think its legitimate to buy 1000+ paid links, they say: its normal that you buy links when you want to reach your audience.

I DO agree with that, BUT i think its great that google don't accept this, and tries to get the sites with the best information on top.

Lots of SEO people will not like this, since it gets harder to push up the sites in the rankings. Well i don't care, most people on this forum seem to be more busy in fooling google, then in building usefull content.

I think what you are seeing is the inevitable result of our shop-til-you-drop click-and-buy society. Anyone running a commercial site must make getting the page in front of the customer a priority. There is no point in having great content if no one gets to see it.

People running information sites do not have that pressure and may not be so SEO focussed. They are probably less frequently to be found at this forum which is after all about Google news.

you are wrong saying that google doesn't accept those tricks. It does accept it because guys using those tricks are in the top 10. I deal with a very competetive area and according to my observations getting a lot of links is the key now with google. The more links the better, and content has to be just more or less relating to your keywords. HarryM is right. What is content good for if only 10 people a month can see it?

As it happens all the time in real life, everything's about winning. There was a thread here about a site with a lot of good content but few backlinks which was nowhere in SERPs. It looks like those with crap and 1000s links win in this site's case and make a 1000 dollars a day and I have a feeling that the guy who runs that site would be happy to be in their shoes.

The site is worth anything only if it has visitors, if it doesn't then it's just a toy.

You might be in an area with low competition and you can afford those inspiration speeches of yours. Perhaps there are few spammers in your area and you haven't seen them in all their glory and amazing success.

Question: they might have a lot of hits, but that doesn't mean that they are succesful, i strongly believe that its a AND - AND situation not a AND - OR. So you are right that you still need backlinks if you have a good site. But on the other hand, you still need a good site, even when you have a lot of backlinks.

If they are an affiliate and offer advertising links to good and services, of course they are successful if they have visitors. You don't need to right a novel to sell goods. You only need a small teaser and a link.

It doesn't take Dostoevsky to make content for a site. Just don't forget to put your keywords somewhere on the page. You may call it crap but usually that's enough for commerce.

Again, find that thread about a site with the best content in business but least SE traffic. That guy is really desperate and I totally understand him. I think we should be honest and not beat around the bush. In competetive areas it's a real battle and virtually all means are good in that battle.

decent or good sites keep receiving links all the time. Link-building is one part, but getting links without asking for them is another, and this happens all the time in case of decent sites. So if Google resets time when a new link is noticed, a good site will never get out of that waiting period. Don't think Google will try something as silly as that.

Has anyone else noticed that google.ca SERPs are constantly being moved over to www2 and www3 and as such are providing a pretty good indicator of how the main .com index is going to look in a couple of days? I've noticed this for the last 2 weeks. Of course it may just be coincidence...

It certainly appears that there has not been a major update, however I myself as well as other members have suffered a massive loss in hits this past week. It does appear that PR has updated. My index page is still a 6, but my internal pages all dropped from 6 to 5. Most people have not seen a significant change in position, but still something has hit many other site owners this past week. Perhaps a slight tweak in the algo or a few new penalties were recently implemented. I would love to hear from anyone else suffering from a recent loss in hits.